There’s a scary amount of stuff going on in writer-director Christopher Landon’s horror movie/murder mystery/domestic drama/deep-state thriller/coming-of-age teenage romance. It may be based on the short story “Ernest” by Geoff Manaugh. But there’s nothing short about it. At the same time, it has its charms.

Sympathetic, engaging documentary.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

What may feel like Mr. Sfar's indulgences are sometimes just that, but one could hardly make an honest movie about Gainsbourg that wasn't as recklessly ambitious as this.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

The movie finally comes together into something that is genuinely -- and almost quietly -- stirring.

It is an inspiring story, no surprise, told with a great deal of warmth.

Any shortfalls in Home on the Range a conventional but perfectly pleasant entertainment, have more to do with the ABC's of storytelling than with the D's of animation.

If you’re looking for the exhaustive movie bio on Reggie Jackson, look elsewhere: He’s in this thing for one reason only. Though if you want to watch him hit ninth-inning dingers out of Yankee Stadium, there’s a lot of that. And it is certainly fun.

Mr. Ritchie is back with more of the same in his second feature, a comedy called "Snatch" that's a sort of lethal pinball machine in which even more picturesque characters bounce from pillage to post.

An attractive, intelligent film that's intractably at odds with itself.

Notwithstanding a thin script and a color-by-numbers ending, the movie is redeemed by its solid performances.

Ms. Gadot is magnetic, will probably make a delicious Evil Queen in “Snow White,” and is spinning her wheels in the snow of the Alps, the dust of the African desert and the lava sands of Iceland in an effort to place the cornerstone, so to speak, in the construction of yet another kinetic movie series.

At its best, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an impressionist burlesque of contemporary American politics that culminates in a somber lament for lives lost in Iraq. But the good stuff -- and there's some extremely good stuff -- keeps getting tainted by Mr. Moore's poison-camera penchant for drawing dark inferences from dubious evidence.

Given how early the illicit-insemination angle of Fortier’s history is revealed, viewers will suspect that even worse is to come, and they will be right. But that doesn’t mean those same viewers might not have other questions.

In several marvelously postmodern moments it recognizes its own glucose level. And the results are genuinely hilarious.

As a thriller it’s efficient, if formulaic, and technically proficient, if undistinguished.

Directed by James Adolphus (“Soul of a Nation”), the HBO documentary is almost too balanced.

Entertaining when it's really lurid, and Gerard Depardieu is something to behold as the proprietor of a broken-down hotel. He's a spectacular ruin in his own right.

If Ice Age lacks the fit and finish of top-of-the-line films from Pixar, DreamWorks or Disney, it's still an impressive piece of work for a new feature animation group, and a harbinger of cool cartoons to come.

Thus does a book of literary distinction become not-so-grand-Guignol.

At many points along the way I wanted to wash my hands of Scotland, PA., but then this sly, silly comedy got me smiling again.

The cast is superb: especially Kate Winslet, who transcends, by far, the limits of her character's narrow soul. Yet The Reader remains schematic, and ultimately reductive.

It’s a reasonably clever contrivance built around a pair of droll, skin-deep performances that are smart and entertaining, yet oddly lacking in intensity.

Endearing, though sometimes belabored.

So many movies these days are overworked or overblown: The Hammer feels genuinely tossed-off. It isn't a great movie, or even a consistently good one. Yet it gets to elusive feelings about failure and success, hope and mortality (and reveals a quietly subversive attitude toward the boxing-movie genre).

A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos.

Mr. Maquiling's gotta learn more about dramatic arcs, but he has an infectious interest in how the world looks and works, and he can make you laugh unexpectedly. I look forward to his next film.